Meryl Streep Quotations

I want to feel my life while I'm in it.

I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

You just have to keep on doing what you do. It's the lesson I get from my husband; he just says, Keep going. Start by starting.

People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

I'm a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject.

I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.

I don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school.

The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.

My family really does come first. It always did and always will.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.

I always feel like I can't do it, that I can't go through with a movie. But then I do go through with it after all.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I'm thrilled when I get nominated. I don't count how many and I don't remember how many I've had. I just know it's a lot.

My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.

All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.

I can't stand most things that I see.

Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.

How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.

I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.

Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.

You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.

For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other.

I couldn't care less about fashion. If I had taken any clothes home, they would have remained in my closet for the rest of their existence.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.

Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.

There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.

America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.

I don't know why I don't watch a lot of movies; I can barely keep up with the things my friends are in. There isn't enough time in life.

I had this sort of idolatry for certain actors who preceded me, people who inspired me, so I'm honored to be that way for young actors.

I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.

The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

I guess a normal woman would find it extremely enjoyable to wear fancy clothes. For me, I didn't enjoy it. It felt like a straight jacket.

So yeah, when I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.

In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

Well, she's so alive, Julia Child. And Margaret is so - is so designed. She's so intent upon making her point. That's the most important thing, is that she win the argument, and there is nothing that stands in the way of that train, you know. But Julia's just alive in front of you. That's part of why people loved her. They lived it with her. They breathed it with her. And the mistakes were all part of it.

You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize that each day is a gift.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.

I think we reserve a special place in our hearts for women who dare to try and be powerful, or occupy a special elevated place in society or when they are 'the bosses'. I think we really don't like it as a society and we have a harsh view of them. We look much harder at them, than the millions of men who aspire to the same positions and I can't figure that out.

It's amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!

loving women of a certain age in movies and in life.

Now, to see it all together is really quite, quite extraordinary. It's a spectacular museum. I just think Joe (Thompson) has done an amazing job. It's such an inspiring place here, really. It makes you remember why you're alive.

I am thrilled and honored to be nominated, and also aghast that anybody could imagine that I could surpass the unsurpassable Katharine Hepburn in any category whatsoever. But it's lovely to even be mentioned in the same sentence.

I love Chinese movies and don't get enough of them in the United States and that's why people hold film festivals to make others aware of films in other countries,

I feel really proud of the movie and I think its properly subversive and its very human. I think its properly subversive and very human. It relies on humor and music to communicate what's being lost...For me it was really great to locate something true about America, something that cuts across all levels of sophistication and humanity, about who we are as Americans, and that's why I loved being in it.

The career I chose was a drama major in college, at Yale, when I played a 90-year-old woman. One of my most celebrated roles. Then I played a really fat person. I played a lot of different things. That's how I thought I loved to wrangle my talent, my need to express myself. I like to do it that way.

A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.

I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've been really, really lucky. My career has been given to me by the people I've worked with. The actors, the directors, the cinematographers, the writers, all of whom gave me the opportunity to work in the way that I have and I'm really grateful.

I don't really talk about my process very much, because I feel like if I give something away, it might not come back.

It's sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking.

Life is all about making choices and I'm very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I've also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband.

I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.

And it interferes with your ability to be a good actress if you're constantly aware of yourself as a person. To me, it isn't valuable to think about how I'm coming off all the time if I'm trying to create a character, because that's a process that I love. It's like falling in love and surrendering to another person or a character.

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do.

Fear focuses the mind.

I separated myself in Prada because I didn't want to have fun. They were all having a lot of fun - Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci - and they were a little coterie of laughs.

You didn't have to work to keep your fear up, your energy up, or your anxiety. It is all kind of built into the process.

When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don't have a cook now, I haven't had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone's homework at the end of the day and make dinner.

I would never say don't do acting [to my kids], because I think it is a glorious profession and I am so thankful for everything it has let me express.

I am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband.

Sometime really good writing does you a disservice as an actor. Because you can get lazy. It's doing a lot of the work for you. I guess that's good. But at the same time with material that's not so good, you have to be more inventive, because no thought has been applied to it.

Sometimes it's easier for people who are in authority to be authoritarian, because people know where you stand.

When you're an actor and there's no music, you have to sort of bring it all yourself.

If you raise children, you forget what age they are. I mean you don't literally forget, but you treat a 13-year-old like she's 10 and there's a big difference in those three years and they can't stand it. They want to be treated like they're 17 when they're 13. And sometimes you can't help thinking of them as if they were 10 or 10 months old because it's all so recent. So we do overprotect sometimes.

I don't have very much interest in trends and fashions. I don't follow the fashion shows and stuff like that into my real life. But I'm very, very interested in how people put themselves together, how women and men announce themselves to the world, through what they put on their bodies. Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry - it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me.

I feel much more comfortable dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. "Devil Wears Prada" did not make me change my style. But it has made me appreciate the people who do this every morning in a serious way, get dressed up and really put together that look. I mean, wow. It's amazing.